“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 778 (Tuesday) – asakura

The 1950 U.S. Census was released on April 1, and it was a big deal in the genealogy world. The census data is released to the public 72 years after it is conducted, and this was the big year. For a year I’ve known about the upcoming release of the 1950 data, and thought about how much fun it would be to look up the records of my family, but April 1 came and went, and I didn’t even log in to the Ancestry-dot-com account.

So many hints!

A year ago, maybe two, (again, it’s all been one mushy blur of time since March 2020), much quality free time was spent going through records on the site and reviewing “hints” of records of potential and known relatives. Images of records were saved to the family tree and the computer.

Tonight was the first time I logged into the system in I don’t even know how many months. There were 651 hints and 33 pages waiting for me. Speed scanning and scrolling, it seemed that most hints were for the spouses of blood relatives. It was exciting (and time consuming) to see all the records from Finland that weren’t available in Ancestry before and required memberships to Finnish organizations. I raced through 25 pages and never even got around to looking at the 1950 Census, which even has its own button on the hints page.

Many Ancestry records include images of original records in beautiful script. The modern transcriptions and artificial intelligence can be frustrating, annoying, or comical. When compared to the image of the original document, they can be wildly divergent from the original content and can explain why records searches come up empty.

Tonight’s transcription hijinks include a complete assassination of my great-grandfather’s name. In Finland his name was Juho Jaakko Näkyvä and in America he was John J Maki. All cool. I know to look for either one (or some variation/bastardization thereof), depending on whether it’s a record from Finland or one from America. 

New family name?

Census enumerators often spelled by phonetics (as was taught by many schools in the 1800s), and depending upon the census year, original census records have John Maki listed as Make, Mackey, Makin, and Mackie. His wife Wilhelmina went by Minna and is listed in census and other records as Wilhelmina, Mina, Minna, Miina, Minnie, and Muna. 

It gets even trickier when modern eyes and machines are reading and transcribing the hand scripted information. The beautiful script of long ago can be hard to read, and the transcription quirk I saw today really took the cake. Great Grandpa John Näkyvä was picked up and noted in Massachusetts Marriage Records as John Asakura, and Minna was showing as Muna. Maybe I need to start searching on Asakura for records.